For low power systems, microcontrollers used in these low power systems need to be in a sleep mode when a user is not actively using the system, however, the capacitive sensing only operates in an active mode, so in order to achieve low power consumption for a system involving capacitive measurement, the system must wake up from its sleep mode for a certain time interval, perform a burst scan of all capacitive sensors, do an evaluation of whether a capacitance change from a previous scan has occurred, and then return to its sleep mode if no capacitance change is detected. The system will continue this sleep/wakeup alternation until a touch/proximity on any capacitive sensors is detected. The average power consumption of the system can be reduced by minimizing the wakeup time that is spent on scanning of all the capacitive sensors.